


Mocafucila

by helado de brownie (helado)



Category: Caves of Qud (Video Game)
Genre: Clairvoyance (Caves of Qud Mutation), Conversation, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Piercings, Shooting, Shooting Guns, Short, Technobabble, Technology, Urshiib (Caves of Qud Species), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:14:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25196041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helado/pseuds/helado%20de%20brownie
Summary: Hello, friend, and welcome to my research camp! Mocafucila, Esteemed Barathrumite Tutor, at your service.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Original Non-Binary Character
Kudos: 10





	Mocafucila

Hello, friend, and welcome to my research camp! Mocafucila, Esteemed Barathrumite Tutor, at your service. Ah, no, no relation. As much as I find Sparafucile an excellent conversation partner. He actually set me up with some of the readings that led to forming the central concept of my particular school of thought.

My school of thought? Well, don't you ever just want to _look_ at things? I do. All the time. So much so that I made it my speciality. I make, carry, study, design, and do all sorts of other verbs with various manners of instruments shaped for the purpose of observing: spectacles, night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, structural scanning bracelets—

Oh, the sniper rifles? A wise bear once said something that resonated with me: Observation is violence. By observing the Thing, we irrevocably change its nature. The Thing was never consulted beforehand – How could it have been? We were not aware of it until we observed it. And upon observing it, we reshape its essence into an idea, comingled with the other ideas we keep in our minds, and irrevocably taint our perception of it. This all happens automatically, in a single instant. Once tainted, we deal with our proxy of the Thing instead of the Thing directly, thus denying its nature, its existence. This denial is violence. And yet creatures cannot exist together without this form of violence.

Sorry, I see that I've lost you. But it's fine. You'd probably need to take at least some of Iseppa's courses anyway, to learn the mindset required to critically approach the topic. Yes, of _course_ I mean Iseppa! She gives a course now and then. Maybe you wouldn't know it just to talk casually with her, but she's extremely insightful, much like all my fellow bears.

… Ah, yes, you may handle it, as long as you observe proper trigger discipline. It's not loaded at the moment, but trigger discipline is important at _all_ times. Ah, hold on, the grip wobbles a little. I've been meaning to repair it—There, now take aim over there. Don't worry, there are no macroscopic creatures you could harm in that direction for multiple parasangs. Well, obviously, it's a gun. I'm not going to have you aiming it at anything you don't mean to kill.

Good, you found it. [She laughs.] I set that target up two days ago. Take these slugs and see if you can hit it from here.

Good for a first try, but you were angled a little to the left. Try again.

Almost. Make sure you're properly aligned with the sight. Even the most minute miscalibrations can lead to enormous discrepancies!

There! Very nice shot. It looks like you hit… three rings out from the center! Nice going! You must not be entirely new to this, huh?

Okay, hand it back. Careful, don't point it at your hoof. Good. Safety's on, and… okay.

So, what brings you all the way out here, friend? My little expedition group usually doesn't see any visitors, much less a visitor from Bey Lah! … Ah, my apologies, I shouldn't have presumed. This actually relates back to my treatise on violence, and as much as I may have studied and researched to reach my conclusions, I'm not immune to propaganda and bias myself.

Me? Well, sometimes, if you want to study observation, you have to go where there's less to observe, you know? I do sometimes see Issachari out here, dawngliders, and even occasionally Templar, among other oddities. But for the most part it's a whole lot of _salt_ , largely undifferentiated at a glance. But even each granule of salt has its own existence.

Here, this is my observational notebook. The pages were shaved from a witchwood tree. No, that has no bearing on the experiment, but it _is_ relevant. Now, look at this first column. This measures… call it the “satedness” of this temporal strand. It's a reading I take with my modified ontological anchor. Like a good experimenter, I record the number exactly as the instruments see it and only then do I do any interpretation. That begins in column two. … You look lost still, so I'll skip to column seventeen. That's the column where I compute, to five significant digits, the relative square parasang and location within that parasang where all salt crystals of interest are located.

You see what I'm doing, right? No? All right, I'll just say it: We're making clairvoyance in bracelet form. It already works. In fact, this is my twenty-ninth experiment altogether on this project. None of my assistant experimenters is a clairvoyant, since that would likely have skewed the results. We're doing this the hard way: by committing violence against the natural order.

You see, the ontological anchor does more than just protect from dimensional perturbances. It holds the form constant with respect to a proxy of the form. That proxy is cast from a mould produced thousands of years ago or more, an anti-memory preserved through time. Well, more of a co-memory, but I can see you're waiting for me to get to the point again. [She laughs.]

By taking advantage of the anchor's natural proclivities towards latching onto things and holding them “as they are”, we can in turn modify the anchor – quite heavily, but the mechanism is still essentially the same – to observe individual things at a distance. I haven't seen at least half of these grains of salt with my own eyes for days, but I can use my readings to locate them.

No, I didn't tag them with any physical object. Doing so would have skewed the results. The moment you take a blue crayon to a grain of salt, you have altered its essence in an irrevocable way, shattering its original form. That violence leaves a mark that is readily observable to my eyes and those of the modded anchor alike, but the goal isn't to find only _marked_ objects. It's to observe _all_ objects in some given domain. So my only choice was to know each of these particular grains of salt so well that they couldn't possibly be mistaken for others. I dedicated several dozens of pages to sketching them, in fact, although I only used that as a tool to imprint them in my mind's eye. We're not studying _sketches_ of objects, after all. As a bear scholar once said, ceci n'est pas un pipe.

Oh, my piercings? You like them? I made them myself. Marking the salt would be violence, since it's a projection of our preconceived notions about a thing, but marking my own body is one of the highest forms of self-expression I can perform. What a thing makes of itself is its true self; what a thing makes of other things is a mockery. Time makes a mockery of us every day, but we claim some of our selves back through how we present ourselves. That's why I make at least one modification to my appearance every single day. Today I added another loop to this earring. Do you like it? That was a rhetorical question. I think it's pretty, and that's all that matters to me.

Heh, I know, some people tell me that I do an awful lot of violence for someone who talks so much about how much things are violence. I've heard it all before. The answer is that of _course_ I do a lot of violence. But isn't it better to be aware of the significance of your actions, instead of unaware? For example, the main purpose of our clairvoyance-in-a-bracelet project is keeping our fellow bears safe from the Putus Templar. I'm not a pacifist, my friend, but even if I were, I would be justified in doing all that I can to sever their ability to visit harm upon us.

Oh! Of course, I would gladly undertake the ritual with you! My thirst is yours, my friend. … Now what is it you would ask of me, water-sib? … A tall order. I'll do it, but are you already knowledgeable in the basic concepts of tinkering? Good, that will make this much easier. Your tutelage will begin at dawn, and I expect it will take at least three suns to go over enough of the project for you to mod a rudimentary one yourself. My camp can provide rations if you don't have enough on your person. It's no trouble.

Sleep well tonight, my water-sib and student!

**Author's Note:**

> Mocafucila is an ascended procedurally generated character. She was an esteemed Barathrumite tutor in one of my Spini runs (see my story Spini for their backstory!) and she offered to teach how to craft spectacles, night-vision goggles, and sniper rifles, a suspiciously thematic set of things. As you might imagine, I was immediately enamored with her.
> 
> Thanks to eva problems for offering the phrases “Don't you ever just want to *look* at things?” and “observation is violence”, the latter of which she tells me was inspired by the works of a Dr. Jenna Katerin Moran, which I have not read.
> 
> Thanks to Crossroads Wanderer and Cloud of Neutron Flux for proofreading!


End file.
